Best Books... Neil LaBute

RECENT FORGERIES by Viggo Mortensen (Smart Art Press £22.50)
Not only a talented actor, Mortensen is also a great artist and a poet. The paintings and drawings in this book suck you in with their beauty and vague sense of menace. His words are simple and vast, and his photography reminds you of the best of Walker Evans.

THE VINEGAR WORKS by Edward Gorey (out of print)
This Gorey collection takes you on a glorious ride through his macabre universe. Troubling illustrations grace these tales, my favourite being The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which uses the gruesome deaths of children to illuminate an A-B-C primer.

BLUE ANGEL by Francine Prose (Allison & Busby £6.99)
A writer of extraordinary gifts, Prose is one of those authors you buy the second you see a new book out. Her take on Heinrich Mann's Professor Unrat is a serious and yet hilarious swipe at PC campus politics and the very idea of sexual harassment.

ZONES OF EXCLUSION: PRIPYAT AND CHERNOBYL by Robert Polidori (Steidl Verlag £40)
Breathtaking photographs - mostly void of humans - centred on two radioactive ghost towns. Gorgeous colour bursts from every frame, but the devastation that haunts the work is almost too much to take.

SALVADOR DALI'S DREAM OF VENUS by Ingrid Schaffner (out of print)
This visual document of a little-remembered controversy from the 1939 World Fair walks readers through the glory and the travesty of an artsy funhouse created by Dalí. It's exactly what you'd expect from the Surrealist and unlike anything you've ever seen.

WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT IS DONE by Crispin Hellion Glover (out of print)
This is a mini-tour through the madcap mind of the actor/director Crispin Glover, and what a journey it is. A collection of ghastly photos, strange illustrations and personal rants that somehow make sense. It might just be genius.
Neil LaBute's play, Reasons to be Pretty, is showing at the Lyceum on Broadway, NY (001 212 239 6200). Books in print are available from the Week Bookshop.
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